There has been a tendency among some teachers over the past few years to develop the notion that “LD” (which is a formerly PC term which was short for learning disabled) to think that those two little letters stood for “lazy and dumb.” While this is the kind of thing which only lends itself well to cruel insult comedy, for a lot of people this is a thought process which is a surprisingly hard one to shake off. For a lot of people, the notion that a student is not able to learn at the level that they “should” be learning at means that there is not a whole lot of hope that they are ever going to be able to learn much of anything in life. This is a pretty harsh sentence to mentally hand down when you are dealing with a child under ten years old. How many kids of that age group even like school in the first place, whether they have a “disability” or not?
The capabilities of a student to learn things need to be sussed out over a period of many years, and can very rarely be fully determined by any one individual. No matter how good of a judge of a person you may believe that you are, far too often children take the evaluations (even if they are not stated) of adults as the limits under which they need to operate. The very self image of a child whom you have deemed to be “disabled” in learning may very well take great pains to prove you right, as self destructive as doing so might be for him or her.
This is why it is imperative that you keep in mind the fact (or even the mantra) that everyone is capable of learning. No matter how tempting it might be to declare that a particular child is simply beyond any kind of hope, you must fight this impulse with every ounce of your mental might. As well, if you should run into these types of sentiments in others, remind them of their imperfections.